Sino-Tibetan Syntax - Nanyang Technological University...Sino-Tibetan Syntax Randy J. LaPolla 3.1 Introduction The Sino-Tibetan language family is second only to Indo-European in number

Chapter 3

Sino-Tibetan Syntax

Randy J . L aP oll a

3.1 Introduction

The Sino-Tibetan language family is second only to Indo-European in number of speakers, though its geographic distribution is restricted to a relatively small area (China, Myanmar [Burma], Nepal, Bhutan, northern India, and some bordering lands). Much work has been done in reconstructing the sound system and lexicon of this family (see for example Benedict 1972; Bodman 1980; Coblin 1986, Matisoff 2003), as well as the morphology (e.g., LaPolla 2003, 2004, 2005 and references therein), but very little has been said about the nature of Sino-Tibetan syntax. If we are to establish a definite link between the different branches of Sino-Tibetan, we must explain the divergences in word order: the modern Sinitic varieties are generally verb-medial, with adjective-noun, genitive-head, relative clause-head, and number-measure/classifier-noun order; on the Tibeto-Burman side, Karen and Bai are also generally verb medial and have relative clause-head and genitive-noun order but have noun-adjective and noun-number-measure order, while the rest of the Tibeto-Burman languages are all verb-final and generally have noun-adjective (and secondarily adjective-noun), genitive-head, relative clause-head, and noun-number-measure order.

Unlike Indo-European, where there is abundant ancient textual evidence, to the extent that it is sometimes possible to have an exact match between text fragments in two different languages within the family (see Watkins 1989), in Sino-Tibetan the time between the break-up of the family into Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman and the develop-ment of writing on both sides of the family1 was long enough to allow one or both sides of the family to change radically. Also unlike Indo-European, what was written about in the earliest attestations of Chinese (divinations) and Tibetan (translations of Sanskrit Buddhist texts) are unrelated, so the chance of similar phrases appearing in both is extremely slim. What we need to do then is analyze the attested languages and then work backward from them, “undoing” the changes that have occurred and project back along that trajectory to the parent language.

OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, Sat Nov 15 2014, NEWGEN

__10.4.1.57_Data_Acad_Med_HE_Acad_US_Wang260414OUS_MANUSCRIPT_17_Revised_proof_Revises_I_Production_Appln_Book.indb 45 11/18/2014 2:03:40 PM

RLapolla

Text Box

In William S-Y. Wang & Chaofen Sun (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Linguistics, 45-57. Oxford University Press, Feb, 2015.

46 Randy J. LaPolla

3.2 Sinitic

Work on Old Chinese and Modern Mandarin has shown Chinese overall to be consistently topic-comment, though the particular constructions used in the different periods have changed considerably. Even within the period that we refer to as Old Chinese, the language shows significant changes that we might trace back to a change in information structure. Unfortunately, we do not have detailed analyses of most of the Sinitic varieties other than Mandarin. Due to the mistaken assumption that the grammar of all Sinitic varieties is basi-cally the same, until recently very little work was done on the grammar of Sinitic varieties other than Mandarin. In particular there has been little work on how information structure affects clause structure in the varieties other than Mandarin. One study that was done (Lee 2002) showed that there are differences between Mandarin and Hong Kong Cantonese in this regard. It would be good, then, if other varieties were investigated in this regard.

Modern Mandarin has been shown to be a language in which constituent order is not gov-erned by syntactic relations such as subject and object but by information structure, with the basic clause structure being topic-comment (Chao 1968; Lü 1979; LaPolla 1995, 2009; LaPolla and Poa 2005, 2006). If Givón (1979) is correct in assuming that languages develop from having more pragmatically based syntactic structures to having more syntactically based structures (as we assume now regularly in discussions of grammaticalization), then the hypothesis should be that since syntax in Modern Mandarin is heavily weighted in favor of pragmatic factors, we should find the same or an even stronger tendency toward pragmatic control of syntax in Old Chinese. In fact Wang Li (1985:8ff) earlier argued for two periods in the history of Chinese, an earlier “not yet fixed grammar” period and a “fixed grammar” era. In the former period, the grammar is loose, as if there is no grammar (Wang Li 1985:9), and he gives examples of structures from that period that are no longer acceptable. Wang Li (1985), Wang Kezhong (1986), and Herforth (1987) all argue that Old Chinese is very much a discourse-based language, so much so that individual sentences very often cannot be inter-preted properly outside the full context in which they appeared. Serruys (1981:356) states that in the oracle bone inscriptions (the earliest Chinese), “there are no particles to mark either concessive or conditional subordinate clauses; everything seems to be implied by context” (emphasis added; see also Takashima 1973:288–305). This radical ambiguity even extends to where, in NP1 V NP2 constructions, NP1 and NP2 can both be either actor or undergoer, depending on the context or knowledge about the referents represented by the NPs (Wang Kezhong 1986). Gao (1987:295) gives examples from the oracle bone inscriptions in which the actor and the undergoer, and even the goal, all appear after the verb.

Discussions of word order in Old Chinese generally start out with a statement to the effect that the most common word order is verb-medial for transitive sentences, just as in Modern Mandarin, so word order has been basically stable, but that there are a number of other word order patterns, particularly verb-final clauses (e.g., Wang Li 1980; Dai 1981; Gao 1987). These clause types have the undergoer (or goal) immediately before the verb, as in (1a-c), from the Zuozhuan (4th century bce; the words in bold are the “preposed objects”; Modern Mandarin forms in pinyin are used instead of reconstructions, as phonology is not at issue here)2:



shiyua

Cross-Out

shiyua

Inserted Text

P (uppercase)

Sino-Tibetan Syntax 47

(1) a. 我无尔诈，尔无我虞。（左传．宣公十五年）

Wo wu er zha er wu wo yu. (Xuan Gong, Year 15) 1sg neg 2sg cheat 2sg neg 1sg deceive ‘I didn’t cheat you, you don’t deceive me.’

b. 君亡之不恤，而群臣是忧，惠之至也。（左传．禧公十五年）

[Jun wang]i zhii bu xu, er [qun chen]j shij you, ruler exile this neg worry but group vassal this worry

hui zhi zhi ye. (Xi Gong, Year 15) compassion gen utmost ass ‘The ruler is not concerned with his own banishment, yet is worried about his

vassals; this is really the height of compassion.’

c. 余虽与晋出入，余唯利是视。（左传．成公十三年）

Yu sui yu Jin churu, yu wei li shi shi. (Cheng Gong, Year 13) 1sg although com pn interact 1sg cop benefit this look.at ‘Although I have dealings with Jin, I only consider benefit (to me).’

In this construction, the immediately preverbal NP is almost always a pronoun in the post-oracle bone texts (7th century bce on). In (1a) we have the pronoun alone, but in (1b–c) the pronoun is resumptive, coreferential with the preceding referring expression. In both constructions the focus is narrow and contrastive. In the latter the event/thing to be focused on is first introduced then commented on using the pronoun and predi-cate, much like in the English construction What do I want? You coming to work on time, that is what I want! The narrow focus and contrastive nature can be seen clearly in the parallelism of (1a–b) and in the use of the copula wei in (1c), which is a narrow focus cleft structure with the sense of ‘only’ (Takashima 1990).

In the oracle bone inscriptions the construction is less restricted, allowing full NPs and preposition phrases to appear in immediate preverbal position when contrasted. The oracle bone inscriptions were divinations made as statements, often in sets, each one testing a particular course of action (Keightley 1978; Serruys 1981). We see the con-trastive use of word order (but with focus position being immediately preverbal) in sets such as in (2) (Serruys 1981:334), which is a single series of propositions testing whether it is to Zu Ding or to some other spirit that the exorcism is to be performed, and it is clear that what is in focus is the one to perform the exorcism to:

(2) 午卩于祖丁，

X3 yu Zu Ding, perform.exorcism loc Ancestor Ding



48 Randy J. LaPolla

勿于祖丁午卩 wu yu Zu Ding X. do.not loc ancestor Ding perform.exorcism

于羌甲午卩，

yu Qiang Jia X loc Qiang Jia perform.exorcism

勿于羌甲午卩 wu yu Qiang Jia X do.not loc Qiang Jia perform.exorcism ‘Perform an exorcism to Ancestor Ding, don’t perform an exorcism to Ancestor

Ding, perform an exorcism to Qiang Jia, don’t perform an exorcism to Qiang Jia.’

Yu (1980, 1981, 1987) gives examples to show that the so-called “inverted”4 clausal order of undergoer immediately before the verb is not limited to pronouns in negative and question constructions. He gives the function of this word order as “emphasizing” the undergoer, but as the constructions discussed here are narrow focus constructions (including question-word questions), this word order should be seen as putting it in the focus. Yu also argues that the deictic pronouns of Old Chinese, shi 是 (*djeʔ) and zhi之 (*tjɨ), are cognate with Tibetan de ‘that’ and ´di ‘this’5 and that the word order exhibited by these pronouns in these sentences is the original Sino-Tibetan order. Wang Li (1980:356) also suggests that with pronouns the preverbal order may have been the original standard order, “as it is in French” but does not make the connection between this suggestion and the possibility that the order of pronouns may reflect an older gen-eral word order pattern, as it does in French.

What is significant about this pattern is that (a) it is used in most instances for inter-rogative pronouns and contrastive focus; (b) the pronoun in question appears imme-diately before the verb, the usual focus position of verb-final languages (cf. Comrie’s discussion [1981:57, 1988] of focus position in Hungarian); and (c) it is a pattern that first was relatively free, involving lexical nouns and several different pronominal pronouns, then became more and more restricted (what Hopper 1991 refers to as “specialized”), then gradually disappeared over time from Chinese texts (see Yin 1985—in Modern Mandarin there are now only fossilized remnants, such as hezai 何在 [interrogative pronoun-locative verb] ‘where’). It would seem from the phenomena presented here that immediate preverbal position was the focus position in Old Chinese—at least in contrastive sentences—whereas Modern Mandarin has a very strong postverbal focus position (see LaPolla 1995, 2009; LaPolla and Poa 2005, 2006).

In terms of phrase-internal constituents, the order in Old Chinese is generally modifier-modified (attribute-head, genitive-head, demonstrative-head,




relative CLAUSE-head, negative-verb), and also adposition-noun, numeral-head (or head-numeral-classifier/measure), adjective-marker-standard, though there are a number of examples of head-attribute order (e.g., sang rou 桑柔 [mulberry- tender] ‘tender mulberry’) and noun-adposition order as well (Wang Li 1980; Dai 1981; Shen 1986).6

Sun (1991) discusses the history and distribution of the preposition phrases with yi 以. He shows that the adpositional phrase (AP) can occur before or after the verb, and that the adposition itself can be prepositional or postpositional, the only restriction being that the postpositional AP cannot appear postverbally. Sun suggests that based on this pattern, the postpositional, preverbal AP is the archaic order. Based on topic continuity counts of the type used in Givón (1983), he argues that the position of the prepositional AP before or after the verb is related to discourse-pragmatic factors—the preverbal type is more likely to be used in contrastive contexts. Interestingly, he found that when it occurred with the deictic pronoun shi 是 ‘that’, yi only appeared postpositionally. Again we see what seems to be a more conservative sentence pattern with pronouns.

As with the NP-NP-V clauses, the frequency of these marked word order patterns decreased over time and finally disappeared completely (though traces of these patterns can be seen in the fixed expressions suoyi 所以 [pronoun-postposition] ‘therefore’, heyi 何以 [what-postposition] ‘why, how’, shiyi 是以 [pronoun-postposition] ‘therefore’).

Yu (1980, 1981, 1987) argues that the other examples of marked word order, such as noun-attribute (as in sang rou ‘tender mulberry’, Qu Xia 区夏 ‘Xia District’) and noun-adposition order (he gives examples with yu 于, zai 在, and yi 以), are also rem-nants of the original Sino-Tibetan word order. Qin and Zhang (1985) argue that the early Chinese expressions of ‘you + country name’ (You Shang 有商 ‘Shang Country’, You Xia 有夏 ‘Xia Country’, etc.) should be seen as examples of noun-attribute order, with you meaning ‘country’. They point out that noun-attribute order is not at all uncommon in the earliest Chinese, especially in names of places and people, such as in Qiu Shang 邱商 ‘Shang Hill’, Di Yao 帝尧 ‘Emperor Yao’, Zu Yi 祖乙 ‘Ancestor Yi’.

In Old Chinese all adverbial quantifiers generally appeared in preverbal position, as in (3a). In Modern Mandarin some quantifiers still appear in preverbal position, but more often those composed of a numeral and verbal classifier appear in postverbal position, as in (3b).

(3) a. 齐人三鼓. （左传．庄公十年）

Qi ren san gu (Zuozhuan: Zhuang Gong, Year 10) pn person three drum ‘The Qi army drummed three times’

b. 齐国军队敲了三次鼓。

Qiguo jundui qiao-le san-ci gu pn army hit-pfv three-times drum ‘The Qi army drummed three times’



50 Randy J. LaPolla

As a verbal quantifier is generally used when the assertion is about the number of times one does something, it would follow that a change of focus position from immediate preverbal position to postverbal position would entail a corresponding change in the position of such quantifiers when they are focal.

In Modern Mandarin the order of elements in nominal quantifier phrases is always (except in listings/catalogues) ‘number + measure/classifier + noun’. In Old Chinese, the order was ‘noun + number + measure’ (there were few classifiers) or ‘number + noun’. Takashima (1985, 1987) gives a pragmatic explanation to the variation—the former is used when the number is focal and the latter when it is not. It is significant that the common order with measures (noun + number + measure) is the same as that of most Tibeto-Burman languages (see LaPolla 2002).

Chou (1961) and Dai (1981) both analyze all sentences in Old Chinese as topic-comment structures. Dai (1981) and Shen (1986) both state that alternate word order patterns exist for pragmatic reasons: to set off a particular element as either a topic or a comment. There are very few restrictions on alternate word orders; in fact some elements that cannot “topicalize” freely in Modern Mandarin do so reg-ularly in Old Chinese. Just as in Modern Mandarin, in Old Chinese there are also “topic-comment within a topic-comment” structures (see LaPolla and Poa 2005, 2006 on this structure).

Relative clauses in the earliest Chinese (which, according to Chen 1956:133 and Gao 1987:283, is based on, and close to, the spoken language of the day—13th century bce) do not have any overt relational marking; they are simply placed before the noun, with no additional marking (Serruys 1981:356). This is a common pattern found in verb-final languages (cf. Greenberg 1966) and the only pattern reconstructable to Proto-Tibeto-Burman (see LaPolla 2002, 2008).

Aside from this, the position of certain clause particles at the end of the clause and the position of adverbs within the clause in Old Chinese is generally more similar to what we would expect from a verb-final language.

These are just a few of the facts that suggest that Old Chinese was very likely even more pragmatically based than Modern Mandarin and that there was a change in word order, from verb-final to verb-medial, at least partially related to a change in focus posi-tion but possibly also related to language contact, as in the case of Bai and Karen (see below, and LaPolla 2001).

3.3 Tibeto-Burman

Karen and Bai manifest the same pattern as in Old Chinese in terms of the major con-stituents: unmarked verb-medial order but NP-NP-V as a marked word order pos-sibility. What is significant is that the conditions on the use of the marked word order pattern in Bai are almost exactly the same as those of Old Chinese: it is used when the second NP is a contrastive pronoun or when the sentence is negative or a question




(Xu and Zhao 1984). Also interesting about the use of the different word order pat-terns in Bai is the fact that the older people prefer the verb-final order, whereas the younger and more Sinicized people prefer the verb-medial order (Xu and Zhao 1984). This would seem to point to the change in word order as being relatively recent. Karen (e.g., Solnit 1997) has similar word order patterns, with genitives and nominal modi-fiers coming before the noun and number and classifier following the noun, while adjectival and verbal modifiers follow the verb. Karen does not appear to have a pre-verbal focus position; from the data in Solnit (1997), it seems that focus position is sentence-final as in Modern Mandarin. Karen possibly changed because of the influ-ence of the surrounding Tai and Mon-Khmer languages. In terms of phrase-internal order, Karen is very similar to Old Chinese, differing mainly in terms of having head-attribute order as the unmarked word order, as opposed to Old Chinese, which has it only as a marked order.

Karen and Bai differ from most of the rest of the Tibeto-Burman languages mainly in terms of the position of the NP representing the undergoer referent and in terms of having prepositions. At the phrasal level there is variety among the Tibeto-Burman lan-guages, but there are clear dominant patterns. Table 3.1 lists the number of languages with the dominant pattern in the leftmost column, followed by that of the minority pat-tern and then the number of mixed languages. The last column is the total number of languages for which data was available on that particular category.

Among the languages with mixed patterns, from the use of the different patterns it was sometimes possible to determine which of the two possible orders was dominant or older within that language, and in most cases (all categories except for demonstrative and head order) the dominant order was the same as that in the leftmost column in Table 3.1.

Based on these numbers, plus the distribution and conditions on occurrence of the different phrase internal word order patterns, I believe the original order of these elements in Proto-Tibeto-Burman was demonstrative-head, head-attribute, relative CLAUSE-head, head-number, negative-verb, noun-adposition, genitive-head, standard-(marker)-adjective.

Table 3.1 Phrase patterns in Tibeto-Burman languages

dem-h (60) h-dem (29) dem-h-dem (7) mixed (17) total: 113h-att (66) att-h (25) mixed (31) total: 122rel-h (65) h-rel (7) mixed (10) total: 82h-num (97) num-h (14) mixed (14) total: 125neg-v (69) v-neg (39) mixed (12) total: 120gen-h (121) h-gen (Ø) mixed (Ø) total: 121st-(m)-att (74) att-(m)-st (Ø) mixed (Ø) total: 74

Note: att = attribute, dem = demonstrative, gen =genitive, h = head, m = marker (in comparative), neg = negation, num = numeral, rel = relative clause, st = standard (in comparative), v = verb.



52 Randy J. LaPolla

These may also have been the dominant orders in Proto-Sino-Tibetan as well. The most controversial of these orders is demonstrative-head, as it would seem from some factors that the opposite order is more archaic (e.g., the oldest written language, Tibetan, has head-demonstrative order), and it is my own gut feeling that head-demonstrative is the older order, yet given the numbers presented in Table 3.1, and the fact that the other old written languages (Burmese, Newari, Tangut) in Tibeto-Burman and also Old Chinese all have demonstrative-head order, I am forced to conclude that this is the older order.

In terms of position of auxiliaries, the dominant pattern in Tibeto-Burman is for the auxiliary verbs to follow the main verb, though there are a number of languages that have the opposite order, as in Sinitic and Karen. Change of auxiliary position from postverbal to preverbal can come about from serial, clause chaining constructions (see Young and Givón 1990 for an example of this in Chibchan [Panama/Costa Rica]), such as are com-mon in Sino-Tibetan languages.

Most important to supporting my hypothesis that the development of a postverbal, or sentence-final, focus position motivated the change to verb medial order are examples in which NPs in otherwise solidly verb final languages appear in postverbal (clause-final) position for emphasis of their status as focal constituents, as in the following Tamang examples (from Taylor 1973:100–101).7

(4) a. asu-ce-m yampu-m ‘khana ‘khana kor-jeht-ci tinyi syoo-ri. Actor Location Location Event Time ‘Where did you go for a stroll around Kathmandu this morning, Asu?’

b. ‘dehre-no chyaa-la thenyi-’maah-ta-m. Time State Site ‘Now they will receive (the money).’

c. ta-ci kon ‘dehre bis-bahrsa. Event Vocative Time Undergoer ‘Now twenty years have passed, Kon.’

d. Tup-’maah them-pala’Tim chyau-’maak-ri. Undergoer State Site ‘The threads were placed in the sides (of the loom).’

e. ‘icu-’maah-ri ‘raa-pi ‘phinyi-ka cung-pala yaa-ce hoi. Site Undergoer State Instrument ‘Here (in these places) the weaving comb is caught by the hand.’




f. ken ca-ci the-ce-no. Undergoer Event Actor ‘It was indeed he who ate the rice.’

This is a narrow focus construction, the flip side of the one we saw in Old Chinese, as the unmarked focus position is preverbal in Tamang.

3.4 Conclusions

It has been shown in languages outside Tibeto-Burman that even in otherwise verb-final languages there is a tendency for at least some types of focus to appear postverbally (see for example Herring and Paolillo 1995). This has been used as an argument for a uni-versal sentence final focus position (e.g., Hetzron 1975). Whether or not sentence final focus is universal, we have seen evidence in Tamang of this type of pattern, and it may exist in many other languages within Tibeto-Burman as well. If in Proto-Sinitic postver-bal focus was one possibility, and this originally marked pattern came to be so frequent that it became the unmarked pattern, then it would cause a change in the unmarked position of the undergoer, as the NP representing the undergoer is most often in focus position cross-linguistically.

As postverbal focus in verb-final languages is generally a discourse phenomenon (i.e., does not show up in canonical sentences), the rareness of this construction in the litera-ture may simply be because it does not turn up in the usual elicited data on which most of the sources on Tibeto-Burman languages are based, or is only used for particular rare types of marked focus, as in Tamang. This is again one reason when doing fieldwork we should always record a large amount of naturally occurring text, rather than simply sentences.

Given all the facts discussed here, there is a strong case for the view, originally proposed by Terrien de Lacouperie (1887, chapter 1) and Wolfenden (1929:6–9), that Proto-Sino-Tibetan word order was verb-final and that it was Sinitic, and not Tibeto-Burman, that was the innovator in terms of word order, and it is very likely this change came about at least partially because of a change in the unmarked focus position.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for the support of the Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica, and Grant NSC100-2811-H-001-004 from the National Science Council of the Republic of China while writing this chapter.



54 Randy J. LaPolla

Notes

1. The earliest Chinese writing dates to the 13th century bc (Keightley 1978); the earliest Tibeto-Burman writing (Old Tibetan) dates to the seventh century ce (Jäschke 1954). The time depth of the breakup of Sino-Tibetan is about 6,000 years (Wang 1998), roughly the same as Indo-European (Nichols 1992).

2. Abbreviations used in the examples: 1 first person, 2 second person, 3 third person, ASS assertive, COM comititive, COP copula, GEN genitive, LOC locative, NEG negative, PN proper name, PFV perfective, sg singular.

3. Serruys (1981) does not give a pronunciation for this character, and it is not used in Modern Mandarin, so I have represented the pronunciation with “X.”

4. As Wang Li argues (1980:366), this name implies it is a marked order. It is in fact the unmarked order for pronouns.

5. Coblin (1986:149) lists Chinese shi 时 (*djɨ(ʔ)) ‘this’ and shi 是 ‘this, that’ with Tibetan ´di and de but does not include zhi, while Yu (1981:83) equates shi 时 with zhi. (The recon-structed forms are from Baxter 1992.) Yu (1987:39) also equates the Old Chinese copula wei 惟／唯 (*wjij) with the Modern Tibetan copula red, but in this I think he is mistaken, as red does not appear in Old Tibetan texts, so is a late development.

6. All of the Old Chinese adpositions are in some contexts predicative, and so this order is really just a subtype of verb-final word order.

7. This article is in the Tagmemics framework (see Hale 1973); word-for-word glosses are not given; only the roles are given. The focal element is underlined.

References

Baxter, William H. 1992. A Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology. Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs 64. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Benedict, Paul K. 1972. Sino-Tibetan: A Conspectus, James A. Matisoff, Contributing Editor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bodman, Nicholas C. 1980. Proto-Chinese and Sino-Tibetan: Data towards establishing the nature of the relationship. In Contributions to Historical Linguistics, ed. by F. Van Coetsem and L. R. Waugh, 34–199. Leiden: E. J. Brill.

Chao, Yuen Ren. 1968. A Grammar of Spoken Chinese. Berkeley: University of California Press.Chen, Mengjia. 1956. Yinxu Buci Zongshu [A survey of Yin oracle bone inscriptions].

Beijing: Kexue Chubanshe.Chou, Fa-Kao. 1961. Zhongguo Gudai Yufa, Zaoju Bian [A historical grammar of Ancient

Chinese, Part I: Syntax]. Zhongyang Yanjiu Yuan Lishi Yuyan Yanjiusuo Zhuankan Zhi 39 (shang). Taipei: Academia Sinica.

Coblin, Weldon South. 1986. A Sinologist’s Handlist of Sino-Tibetan Lexical Comparisons Monumenta Serica Monograph Series XVIII. Nettetal: Steyler Verlag.

Comrie, Bernard. 1981. Language Universals and Linguistic Typology. Oxford: Blackwell.Dai, Lianzhang. 1981. Gudai Hanyu de yuxu bianhuan [Word order permutations in Old

Chinese]. Proceedings of the International Conference on Chinese Studies, August 15–17, 1980. Taipei: Academia Sinica.

Gao, Ming. 1987. Zhongguo Guwenzixue Tonglun [A conspectus of Chinese graphology]. Beijing: Wenwu Chubanshe.



shiyua

Cross-Out

shiyua

Inserted Text

t (lowercase)


Givón, Talmy. 1979. From discourse to syntax: grammar as a processing strategy. In Discourse and Syntax. Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 12, ed. by T. Givón, 81–112. New York: Academic Press.

Greenberg, Joseph H. 1966. Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements. In Universals of Language, ed. by J. H. Greenberg, 73–113. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Hale, Austin. 1973. Toward the systemization of display grammar. In Clause, Sentence, and Discourse Patterns in Selected Languages of Nepal I, ed. by Austin Hale, 1–38. Kathmandu, Nepal: Tribhuvan University Press.

Herforth, Derek D. 1987. A case of radical ambiguity in Old Chinese: Some notes toward a discourse-based grammar. Suzugamine Joshi Tanki Daigaku Bulletin of Humanities and Social Science Research 34:31–40.

Herring, Susan C., and John C. Paolillo. 1995. Focus position in SOV languages. In Word Order in Discourse, ed. by P. Downing and M. Noonan, 163–198. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Hetzron, Robert. 1975. The presentative movement, or why the ideal word order is VSOP. In Word Order and Word Order Change, ed. by C. N. Li, 347–388. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Hopper, Paul J. 1991. On some principles of grammaticization. In Approaches to Grammaticalization, Vol. 1, ed. by E. Traugott and B. Heine, 17–35. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Jäschke, H.A. 1954. Tibetan Grammar. New York: Fredrick Ungar. (Reprint of 3rd ed., Berlin 1929)Keightley, David N. 1978. Sources of Shang History: The Oracle Bone Inscriptions of Bronze Age

China. Berkeley: University of California Press.LaPolla, Randy J. 1995. Pragmatic relations and word order in Chinese. In Word Order in

Discourse, ed. by P. Downing and M. Noonan, 297–329. Philadelphia: John Benjamins._____. 2001. The role of migration and language contact in the development of the Sino-Tibetan

language family. In Areal Diffusion and Genetic Inheritance: Case studies in Language Change, ed. by R. M. W. Dixon and A. Y. Aikhenvald, 225–254. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

_____. 2002. Problems of methodology and explanation in word order universals research. In Dongfang Yuyan yu Wenhua [Languages and cultures of the East], ed. by Pan Wuyun, 204–237. Shanghai: Dongfang Chuban Zhongxin.

_____. 2003. An overview of Sino-Tibetan morphosyntax. In The Sino-Tibetan Languages, ed. by G. Thurgood and R. J. LaPolla, 22–42. New York: Routledge.

_____. 2004. On nominal relational morphology in Tibeto-Burman. In Studies on Sino-Tibetan Languages: Papers in Honor of Professor Hwang-cherng Gong on his Seventieth Birthday, ed. by Ying-jin Lin, Fang-min Hsu, Chun-chih Lee, Jackson T.-S. Sun, Hsiu-fang Yang, and Dah-an Ho, 43–74. Taipei: Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica.

_____. 2005. The inclusive–exclusive distinction in Tibeto-Burman languages. In Clusivity: Typology and Case Studies on Inclusive/Exclusive Oppositions, ed. by Elena Filimonova, 289–310. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

_____. 2008. Relative clause structures in the Rawang language. Language and Linguistics 9.4:797–812.

_____. 2009. Chinese as a topic-comment (not topic-prominent and not SVO) language. In Studies of Chinese Linguistics: Functional Approaches, ed. by Janet Xing, 9–22. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

LaPolla, Randy J., and Dory Poa. 2005. Jiaodian jiegou de leixing ji qi dui Hanyu cixu de yingx-iang [The typology of focus structures and their effect on word order in Chinese]. In Jiaodian



shiyua

Cross-Out

shiyua

Inserted Text

s (lowercase)

56 Randy J. LaPolla

Jiegou he Yuyi de Yanjiu [Studies on the structure and semantics of focus], ed. by Xu Liejiong and Haihua Pan, 57–78. Beijing: Beijing Foreign Studies University Press.

_____. 2006. On describing word order. In Catching Language: The Standing Challenge of Grammar Writing, ed. by Felix Ameka, Alan Dench, and Nicholas Evans, 269–295. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Lee, Edith Yuet Ying. 2002. The Influence of Information Structure on Word Order in Cantonese. Master’s thesis, City University of Hong Kong.

Lü, Shuxiang. 1979. Hanyu Yufa Fenxi Wenti [Questions in the analysis of Chinese grammar]. Beijing: Commercial Press.

Matisoff, James A. 2003. Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman: System and Philosophy of Sino-Tibetan Reconstruction. University of California Publications in Linguistics 135. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Nichols, Johanna. 1992. Language Diversity in Space and Time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Qin, Jianming and Maorong Zhang. 1985. Ye tan gu guoming qian de ‘you’ zi [Another discus-sion of the character ‘you’ before ancient country names]. Zhongguo Yuwen 4:286–287.

Serruys, Paul L.-M. 1981. Towards a grammar of the Shang bone inscriptions. Proceedings of the International Conference on Chinese Studies, August 15–17, 1980, 313–364. Taipei: Academia Sinica.

Shen, Xiaolong. 1986. Zuozhuan zhuti ju yanjiu [A study of topic sentences in the Zuozhuan]. Zhongguo Yuwen 2:130–142.

Solnit, David B. 1997. Eastern Kayah Li: Grammar, Texts, Glossary. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Sun, Chao-Fen. 1991. The adposition YI and word order in classical Chinese. Journal of Chinese Linguistics 19.2:203–228.

Takashima, Ken-ichi. 1973. Negatives in the King Wu Ting Bone Inscriptions. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington, Seattle.

_____. 1985. On the quantitative complement in oracle bone inscriptions. Journal of Chinese Linguistics 13.1:44–68.

_____. 1987. Noun phrases in the oracle bone inscriptions. Monumenta Serica 36:229–302._____. 1990. A study of the copulas in Shang Chinese. The Memoirs of the Institute of Oriental

Culture 112:1–92.Taylor, Doreen. 1973. Clause patterns in Tamang. In Clause, Sentence, and Discourse Patterns

in Selected Languages of Nepal II, ed. by Austin Hale, 81–174. Kathmandu, Nepal: Tribhuvan University Press.

Terrien De Lacouperie, Albert Etienne Jean Baptiste. 1887. The Languages of China before the Chinese. London.

Wang, Kezhong. 1986. Gu Hanyu dong bing yuyi guanxi de zhiyue yinsu [Factors conditioning the relationship between subjects and objects in Old Chinese]. Zhongguo Yuwen 1:51–57.

Wang, Li. 1980. Hanyu Shigao [Outline history of the Chinese language]. Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju. (Reprint of 1958 version)

_____. 1985. Zhongguo gu wenfa. In Wang Li Wen Ji [Collection of Wang Li’s works], Vol. 3, 1–85. Jinan: Shangdong Jiaoyu Chubanshe.

Wang, William S-Y. 1998. Three windows on the past. In The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia, ed. by Victor H. Mair, 508–534. Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Man Inc.




Watkins, Calvert. 1989. New parameters in historical linguistics, philology, and culture history. Language 65.4:783–799.

Wolfenden, Stuart N. 1929. Outlines of Tibeto-Burman Linguistic Morphology. London: Royal Asiatic Society.

Xu, Lin, and Yansun Zhao. 1984. Baiyu Jianzhi [Brief description of the Bai language]. Beijing: Minzu Chubanshe.

Yin, Guoguang. 1985. Xian Qin Hanyu dai yufa biaozhi de binyu qianzhi jushi chutan [An ini-tial discussion of Pre-Qin Chinese clause patterns with preposed objects with grammatical marking]. Yuyan Yanjiu 2:162–171.

Young, Philip D., and Talmy Givón. 1990. The puzzle of Ngäbére auxiliaries. In Studies in Typology and Diachrony, ed. by W. Croft, K. Denning, and S. Kemmer, 209–243. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Yu, Min. 1980. Han-Zang liang zu ren he hua tongyuan tansuo [Research into the common ori-gin of the people and languages of the Chinese and Tibetans]. Beijing Shifan Daxue Xuebao 1:45–53.

_____. 1981. Dao ju tan yuan [Investigating the source of inverted sentences]. Yuyan Yanjiu 1:78–82.

_____. 1987. Jing zhuan shi ci zhaji [Notes on the lexical explanations to the Classics]. Changsha: Hunan Jiaoyu Chubanshe.



Documents

Sino-Tibetan Syntax - Nanyang Technological University...Sino-Tibetan Syntax Randy J. LaPolla 3.1 Introduction The Sino-Tibetan language family is second only to Indo-European in number